Israel’s glass ceiling

Women in Black protest against Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands in Jerusalem

Mariana Vasconcellos · AFP · Getty

Israel’s armed forces (IDF), which already allow women to become fighter pilots, may soon let them serve in tanks. The country is one of the few where military service is not restricted to men, and loudly promotes its female soldiers as part of the world’s ‘most moral’ army. With Golda Meir, the country had a female prime minister as early as 1969.

The IDF website’s section on ‘Women of the IDF’ praises the ‘brave’ and ‘fierce’ female soldiers who patrol Israel’s borders. In history textbooks, photos of young women in uniform with Uzis and camouflage face paint mirror those of earlier women pioneers tilling the soil, paving roads and guarding kibbutzim. Both sets of images reflect the mythology of a modern, egalitarian Zionism, and give the same incomplete picture that obscures the ambivalent social role of women in Israel.

‘Even in the first kibbutzim — there were very few at the start — female members worked far more often in kitchens, vegetable gardens, nurseries and collective laundries than in the fields or in factories,’ said Sarai Aharoni, a researcher at the Haifa Feminist Centre. Israel’s declaration of independence (1948) and the 1951 women’s equal rights law proclaimed the principle of equality, but the Zionist pioneers were far from being feminists.

The founding fathers believed a woman’s first duty in the new state was to ensure the survival of the Jewish people. Failure to produce ‘at least four children’ was a betrayal of ‘the Jewish mission,’ according to the country’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, who in 1949 introduced the Heroic Mothers initiative, which rewarded women on the birth of their tenth child. Until the 1960s, birth announcements in newspapers celebrated the arrival of a ‘new soldier for Israel’s armed forces’. The injunction to breed was frequently repeated, with some success, because of Israel’s demographic race with the Palestinians. In 2015 Israel had the highest birthrate (3.11 children) in the Organisation for (...)